Escaping High School

&gt; Maybe you go to a school in a poor area, or with a lot of violence, or far too many students for the teachers to pay any individual attention to; or, relatedly, maybe you’re required to spend a lot of time caring for siblings or parents, working a low-skill job, or holding your family together or preserving your safety in some way. The disadvantages of this case are obvious, but there are a few advantages too; the strategy, as with everything, is to mitigate the impact of your disadvantages while using your advantages to the maximum. I don’t know enough to say what the best tactics are for these cases, but I have a few theories.<p>I work in exactly the type of school this describes, with exactly these kids. I’m genuinely awed by the hubris it requires to just plow ahead with advice&#x2F;theories about their advantages vs. disadvantages <i>despite having no clue whatsoever what they’re talking about</i>. It makes me genuinely angry. This person can take their theories and shove them up their ass, until they bother spending time in my shoes and really coming face-to-face with the profound systemic and otherwise deep long-term issues kids in this environment have to confront… just to make it to tomorrow. While navigating being a fucking teenager.

&gt; And by the time you’re in your mid-teens, you’re probably as smart as you’re going to be – not as worldly or wise as you will be later, but the raw brainpower is mostly there.<p>I strongly disagree with this. I don&#x27;t know if it is genuinely true in a biological sense, but in my life experience it is not even close to true. There are lots of things I do that are so far beyond my abilities as a teenager. It could be due to other factors, but my gut suggests those other factors are much more important than this comment about mere brain power leads us to believe.

This is an interesting article, but I think it is heavily skewed toward the author’s goals in life and who they innately are. A guide for a more introverted person, or sports-oriented person, or highly social person would be vastly different.<p>In particular, I think the author makes the mistake of believing everyone must be a creator. The reality is most people aren’t good at it, don’t like it and don’t pursue it. And that is OK.<p>It also underestimates how young 14 really is, and how much still needs to be learned in general, not just in school but in life.<p>The difference between 14 and 18 is a vast chasm.

Something that bugs me today is the way music education was handled at my school, and probably other schools.<p>I got to a pretty good technical competence with my trumpet but at the end of the day I could only play what was on the sheets. Maybe some of that is my bad, but I switched to keys after highschool and when I show up to jam, most wind players seem like musical cripples without a lead sheet, and my fakesheets of just chord sequences and important hits are not sufficient for them.<p>Part of it is just the nature of the Program (wind band is a highly synchronized large group activity and you cant have too much screwing around), but I also think the nature of a wind instrument where you have limited endurance and can only play one note at a time is stunting without proper instruction. Despite having great sense of rhythm and phrasing, I don&#x27;t think I really understood music until I started getting chord shapes into my hands on the piano and could noodle without worrying about spending my limited endurance.<p>edited to add: And to be clear I do think the music programs are Good and Valuable. It&#x27;s an excellent group activity and kids will work on something for months for the big concert. I did not have any other single school project with that kind of runtime and that&#x27;s a valuable experience on its own.<p>tldr if your kid likes music dont let them settle for just wind band. Get them a guitar or a piano too. But it&#x27;s fine to just like the band for what it is, too.

&quot;Maybe you go to a school in a poor area, or with a lot of violence ... I don’t know enough to say what the best tactics are for these cases, but I have a few theories.&quot;<p>This pretty much says it all right here. The author comes from an incredibly privileged background and clearly believes they are smarter than people who have spent their lives studying education.<p>How we educate children isn&#x27;t a perfect system, but educators really are trying to teach important information to all students, including figuring out ways to reach children with very different learning styles, and are stuck balancing what&#x27;s important with the crap forced on them by legislatures, parents, and (hopefully) well-meaning people like the author.

Interestingly, the advice in this article pretty much aligns with what I did, although I can&#x27;t claim I did what I did with any grand strategic vision. I mostly blew off high school doing the bare minimum necessary to graduate, while spending as much time as possible in-person and online with adults who worked in tech and would mentor me, working on side projects, and volunteering on open source. I went to college, but ultimately dropped out, with my most valuable time at community college where I was able to get tech certifications as part of my classwork.<p>It&#x27;s been more than 20 years since I left high school and I&#x27;ve had a very good career and life despite having no degrees and a piss-poor high school GPA, because ultimately none of that actually matters in the real world. All that matters is who you know and whether you can do the job. If you know people who will give you a chance and you can actually succeed at the job, you&#x27;ll do fine. Learning actual skills that other people care about and value is far more important than being able to regurgitate bullshit for a test to get a piece of paper that&#x27;s meaningless. My only real regret is that I didn&#x27;t just drop out of high school and get my GED so I could focus more time on my side-projects at the time.

Pretty decent collection of reasonable advices<p>Especially this: Make sure you aren’t just doing a glorified version of trying to earn good grades.<p>So many people failed on this, mostly because of parents. Dont put effort just for the sake of grades, they are worthless.<p>Just small nitpick to #1<p>Learning just in time =&#x2F;= learning via practice<p>Learning just in case, the opposite of JIT makes sense too, but is &quot;unpredictably effective&quot; - the stuff you learned may be needed and put you ahead, but may not.<p>I&#x27;d add something about living your own life (career, relations, hobby) instead of being &quot;locked&quot; by your friends. Dont go to X school just because your friends go there.<p>Friendships decrease&#x2F;end too. You may barely see them 5 years later due to... life

Personally, I’ve always felt that schooling is a waste of time, money, and resources. The default model of civilization is that children are absent from life. This means that kids are missing out on seeing adults interact, so they mature more slowly, and it also means that their life experiences are limited to what happens in a building. Importantly, after 18 years, people in the USA leave school in debt and are no better suited to professional life than when they entered school at 4 or 5. If I could wave a wand and changing things, I’d restructure civilization to expect children to be present everywhere with their parents or other family members, learning by being part of civilization as every young adult currently does.

Decades ago, an old friend of mine had a go-getter son, who started a lawn care business when he was ~15. Son was talented, and his business grew <i>very</i> fast. (This was in a well-to-do suburb, before there were so many lawn care businesses. Plenty of good HS students available to hire, and the trucks were leased.)<p>For getting into top-ranked colleges, &quot;the summer business I started in HS is already paying me more than your median graduate&#x27;s full-time job&quot; is a slam-dunk argument.

From the opening:<p>&gt; college isn’t doing a good job of setting you up to succeed in real life<p>Many colleges, especially the prestigious ones, would explicitly deny that as their goal as being too vocational is dismissed for reasons of class history

&gt; As a bare minimum, high school is supposed to give kids somewhere to go while their parents are at work and keep them from ending up pregnant, in jail, or dead<p>Perhaps we should start with putting some trust in the people who are close to the age of majority.<p>High school is not daycare in any shape or form. Highschoolers can largely fend for themselves. Of course they get ideas, but you consistently see less of that when there&#x27;s trust and mutual respect in place.

I really like the author&#x27;s advice to do the &quot;real&quot; thing instead of the &quot;kid&quot; thing. This is what kids in more primitive societies do... if the family is subsistence farmers, the kids are helping do economically productive work from the moment they can. Even in farming communities in the US, kids are driving tractors, fixing cars, actually doing real adult work. Important for kids in the knowledge worker segment to do the same.

Don&#x27;t get me wrong, I appreciate and agree with most of what this post says in isolation, but unfortunately I think it misses the point in a broader context. This advice works when children&#x2F;students have plenty of support from above. It can be counterproductive when they don&#x27;t. It&#x27;s preaching to the comfortable upper-middle-class choir.<p>These days I live in silicon valley and my wife&#x27;s family sponsors a bunch of projects at the montessori school they&#x27;ve attended for multiple generations, but I grew up in a small town in Texas where parents (and teachers) beat children for asking questions the adults don&#x27;t know how to answer. This is advice to help people who are already in a good position get into an even better position. If you&#x27;re born at the bottom, using existing institutions, which are consistent and safe, to escape to a better place might be the best you can hope for. &quot;Getting your friends together and busking&quot; sounds great if you have money to buy instruments and free time to learn how to play them and sane supportive parents who are supportive of that, and that might make you stand out on your ivy league application if you manage to record and self-publish something. But a school marching band gives you an instrument, and schedules time for you to practice during the school day, and is a verifiable piece of experience that a state university will probably recognize even if you don&#x27;t win any form of competition. So I don&#x27;t consider this post to be good advice generally for the masses. And as long as bad parents are allowed to give their children bad childhoods and bad communities are allowed to treat children like property en masse, this advice will be counterproductive for a pretty significant portion of society.

Incredibly narrow minded advice for the privileged.<p>&gt; Maybe you go to a school in a poor area, or with a lot of violence, or far too many students for the teachers to pay any individual attention to; or, relatedly, maybe you’re required to spend a lot of time caring for siblings or parents, working a low-skill job, or holding your family together or preserving your safety in some way.<p>Oh if only not being extremely privileged was so easy to undo. When you work a lot of jobs to keep your family together you don&#x27;t have time for alternative highschool guides. That&#x27;s why people talk about companies being founded in garages and not on the street in Chicago.<p>I&#x27;ve had students who never got a good night of sleep in their lives. Or students with abusive family.<p>People who don&#x27;t come from privileged backgrounds also cannot see themselves doing a lot of the careers related to this guide.<p>&gt; It might be easier to talk teachers into letting you off the busywork for their classes<p>It&#x27;s exactly the opposite. The idea that something is busywork and you tell a teacher you&#x27;re going to do something else instead is privilege. Those teachers they&#x27;re massively overworked and underpaid. They don&#x27;t have time for this nonsense.<p>&gt; Your charm advantage gets increased a little bit in this situation; if you reach out to an adult doing some sort of interesting work.<p>Seeing the author&#x27;s reaction to being contacted by a student who doesn&#x27;t talk they way they do, might have a tattoo, might dress very differently, would be interesting. No. Being poor and I&#x27;m bad conditions is not charming.

It is a decent list, but it probably should be qualified that for a good portion of the population, general education is likely not a bad thing. I love that the article emphasizes practical knowledge, but as I am trying to remember my younger years, I think I rarely thought about any of it in those terms.

This is for fearless kids. Most kids, I think, would be scared to death by these suggestions. It&#x27;s an embarrassment minefield. It&#x27;s better to start experimenting in a more private way in places where you are clearly welcome - student competitions, newbie-friendly websites, publishing stuff quietly without advertising it, reading and lurking, submitting tiny contributions that are clearly wanted, etc.<p>Kids these days do not suffer from scarcity of opportunities. They suffer from lack of confidence. They need to gain confidence through little successes. Sending them out into the world doing things way above their current skill level is going to result in confidence-crushing failures.

Sorry but there is no way to min&#x2F;max life. We all do not get the same amount of time and opportunities. This reads as a verbose and pompous perspective on what one should do around high school age to &quot;succeed&quot; and has absolutely no reflection on the people who actually succeed. A-type people will continue to overachieve and write these types of posts, but their definition of &quot;success&quot; is just different.

We are trying to codify this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;puthir.org" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;puthir.org</a>.<p>My son (and our first learner) launched his portfolio (real work, not fake stuff) back in December and he added his new math toy last month. We expect his portfolio (+ his experience, skill and knowledge) to grow over the next couple of years. Here is his Show HN post: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36603838">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36603838</a>.

&gt; As a bare minimum, high school is supposed to give kids somewhere to go while their parents are at work and keep them from ending up pregnant, in jail, or dead.<p>I&#x27;m sure the tone of the article was meant to be light-hearted + silly + joke-y overall but this is actually interesting to me... Why is that the default? Why do some (most) parents need to actively invest time&#x2F;resources to make sure their kids do not end up pregnant, in jail, or dead instead of the default being &quot;those are non-issues&quot;.

This is wonderful, and I say that as someone who did REALLY WELL in high-school. Which is to say, I have no regrets about any of my schooling (I went on to complete law school) -- but if I&#x27;d thought about things more in this way, it would have better mentally prepared me for thinking about AFTER that.

&gt; And by the time you’re in your mid-teens, you’re probably as smart as you’re going to be – not as worldly or wise as you will be later, but the raw brainpower is mostly there.<p>This doesn’t ring true to me. I don’t feel like I really got to peak “raw brainpower” until about 22-23 years old.

&quot;wear a helmet until you are comfortable with whatever wheels you are riding&quot; sounds like a formula for &quot;die on a bike once you&#x27;ve hit the dunning kruger effect&quot;

As a 16 year old, thank you.

tl;dr - only read the intro<p>&gt; by the time you’re in your mid-teens, you’re probably as smart as you’re going to be – not as worldly or wise as you will be later, but the raw brainpower is mostly there. So you’ve got a four-year chunk during which you’re smart enough to learn anything a novice adult version of you could;<p>1. This presuppoess that &quot;smart&quot; is the essential ingredient for success. How about maturity&#x2F;self-discipline? There is no way a 14 year old has the maturity of an 18 year old to deal with learning or doing difficult things.<p>2. IME a very significant problem that teens have learning is the &quot;fixed mindset&quot;. When they are unable to do something right away, especially if they observe their peers can, most don&#x27;t know how to put in the work to improve. In fact, they behave as if they cannot improve. Concealing one&#x27;s inability to do something is very common.<p>The author does bring this up in &quot;4F&quot; but I don&#x27;t feel like it addresses the problem very well. It postulates an ideal student who will connect with someone who is more motivated than them, but then not just ride their coattails. I don&#x27;t even see that in the business world.